


And Our Sweethearts Were Waiting

by amoama



Category: Charlotte Gray (2001)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 10:34:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amoama/pseuds/amoama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It was strange to be in love with someone who didn’t exist. </i>
</p>
<p>Julien is waiting for the woman he knows as Dominique.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Our Sweethearts Were Waiting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SummerRed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SummerRed/gifts).



It was strange to be in love with someone who didn’t exist. _Dominique Guilbert_ was just a cover after all, one of hundreds of meaningless codes, abandoned, like gas masks and Vichy jurisdiction. No one would lay claim to the name now and yet it evoked such a wealth of emotion for Julien; memories saturated with grief and tenderness. Dominique was the only one to survive with him, his one link to the past, but it was as though she had taken all his loved ones with her: his father, his friends, the boys. Except they were all more traceable than her, now, in death. 

Dominique had disappeared into a gray morning, and never returned. Out there, somewhere, in her place, was a woman who held the same memories as him, remembered and honoured the same people; but she was not Dominique. 

He wondered if it was easier to move on if you could just put who you were aside like that. If that person was only ever a disguise and there was another person, more real, more whole, waiting in the background, whose clothes and friends and loved ones all fit much better. It must be so much easier to forget what happened to Dominique when you stopped being Dominique. Of course, Julien was no longer Octave, but it was not the same.

When she was here, it was easier to pretend that Dominique was just a codename like Octave or Auguste and the person was the same underneath, whatever the name. That had been foolish indulgence. There was no other life for César to run to, no plane to collect Auguste and rush him to the safety of another identity. Julien had known everything about Auguste, or rather, Gastinel, since nursery school whereas Dominique no longer existed, or had never truly existed. She was an illusion they had all agreed to go along with, for their own safety. 

Every day he tried to add up the things he knew about her, his mystery woman. A litany of facts and deductions that he repeated to himself, like tracing beads on the rosary, hoping for answers hidden amongst the familiar words. Nothing ever got him closer to knowing her identity. 

She arrived from England. She spoke perfect French, although definitely more Paris than Provence. She loved a man enough to come to France but he had died. She loved the Dougay boys enough to stay and try to help, but they were gone too. She was trained in explosives. She was brave and idealistic in a way that did not quite match up with the authorities, like Julien himself. His father liked her. 

How funny that it mattered. No one in town had liked his father but she had seemed to. 

Levade had made a name for himself a long time ago with his womanising and his paintings that so disturbed the conservative townsfolk. Julien remembered how he had half-hated his father for caring so little what others thought. Now it was the other way round, he abhorred the town, made up of people that stood by while their fellow Frenchmen were taken away. Everywhere he looked he saw collaborators. What was it he had fought for? He didn’t hate his countrymen for not fulfilling his dreams of a Communist future. He couldn’t, because it would be too petulant to blame others for not sharing his dreams. He just wanted to be alone, like his father had. He could recognise the urge for relief in another person, flesh and sweat and heartbeat, and now he could also understand the sick claustrophobia the moment it was over that had stopped his father from ever settling down. 

Julien thought about moving, about going back to Paris. He tried to go and stay with friends for a while but it was even worse there. Paris fed all the paranoia, guilt and disillusion that persistently circled his mind. 

Besides, there was Dominique, and perhaps others, although he tried not to think of them. Outside of Lezignac she would not know where to find him. There was a thread that led back from this one town to Dominique to the woman who had made Dominique seem so real. He found he couldn’t be the one to snap it. As the one left behind, the one who got to stay, to survive; his duty was to wait, and give in to the paralysis of hope. For Julien, it felt more painful than resistance, but it was unthinkable to abandon it. He stayed mere weeks in Paris before returning to his father’s château, and the comfort of his ghosts, to wait. 

The weeks went on. He worked and it felt like a cover for the endless emptiness surrounding him. He found himself wishing he could paint like his father, that he could throw dark colours at a gleaming white canvas and give his tortured thoughts some shape beyond the shadows of his mind. Instead, he had signed up with a new development company and spent his days making technical designs for tiny flats in old town buildings. It was another form of punishment: no longer drawing elegant, egalitarian concepts for the university or building an environment for social enhancement. Rather, he aborted those designs into briefs on how to fit as many apartments as possible into one building to the profit of the landlord. Many of the houses had belonged to families he knew, people he missed. Julien drew lines across their living rooms, tore their kitchens in half and blocked over their bedrooms. It hurt but he’d rather it be him: at least he knew the history he was ripping through and the phantoms he was skirting round. 

Slowly, the town renewed itself—strange faces arrived to stand in line at the butcher’s and enroll their children in school. The town was expunging its past, welcoming the new faces to paper over the old, covering the cracks, just as Julien did with the old houses he was renovating. 

Eventually Julien turned his attention to the Château. Why should it escape the march of progress? Here he was, waiting, but perhaps, if he made the place unrecognisable then he could change also, find new faces to fit in over the old. It felt to Julien like he didn’t have a choice in his actions. He was alive: how strange and bizarre a reality. How surreal to be here still with everyone else gone. He went on with things for that reason alone; he was still here. His father’s presence reverberated around his head hour after hour, Levade’s shuffling, eloquent silence, weighed on Julien, made him restless and irritable, just like before. Every change Julien made to the house was accompanied by the ungrateful drawl of, _“So now you’re fixing the piping, didn’t I want you to do that years ago?”_ Well now he had nothing more important to do. His reasons for fighting were extinct, his reasons for living were to wait and to show signs of survival. 

His love spiraled out from him during the day; it disconnected from his heart, weaving a course he had no control over, around his daily life, the fixtures and fittings, the stiff lines of new foundations. It returned to him at night, closing down on him until he woke crying out for his past. As many nights as not it was the name, Dominique, that he flung out into the darkness, jolting himself from sleep as if there would be an answer waiting. 

It was worst early in the morning. The mist of the cold dawns too closely resembled the day she left, as though she could have turned and be walking back towards him, shivering and crying, but so vibrant in his arms, always so full of life, even in grief. The memory of those final, hard, desperate kisses has stayed with him, the pressure of her lips distressing his own before tearing away. Everything after that kiss has felt less real, less tangible, as though, if he let himself feel anything as much again, it will crowd out his memory of that touch. He thinks of these things in the morning and then he puts them away and chooses a task for the day, a project to help him crowd out the sensation of his father huffing around in the kitchen and Dominique pressing her lips to his.

Julien writes to the Red Cross about the boys and his father. He gets short replies detailing statistics he already knows as an explanation for the lack of news. They’re looking, they’ve got the details recorded, they’ll let him know in time. 

He doesn’t have anyone to write to for Dominique Guilbert. She didn’t exist, and doesn’t have a forwarding address. _“Meet me at the church”_ is not enough for them now. 

******

He thinks it’s the sunlight that leaves him so off kilter when she returns. He never—he hadn’t believed she would come. He realises he had been waiting to forget her, not with any expectation of succeeding, but not with any hope for her return. How can someone return if they were never real in the first place? It’s a stranger who comes to him, sunsetting warmly around her. Blonde, and taller than he remembers, with a softer voice. The accent is different, even her eyes seem unfamiliar—framed by a different hairstyle, full of emotion that he doesn’t recognise on that face. So this is peacetime, he thinks as he takes her in. “My name,” she says, “is Charlotte Gray.” 

Grey, like the weather he always imagined her trapped in. Not like now, drenched in sunlight. He clings to her because she’s here and even if she’s not Dominique, she’s something close, and she’s real. Her lips are so red, they are a shock to look at but they feel the same, blessedly the same in this wealth of change. This coming together is familiar. When there was no way to explain what was between them, their touch had been full of this: hard, vibrant, desperately clinging to their lives. 

He tries to say goodbye to Dominique as he kisses her. This is Charlotte, Charlotte Gray, she’s here now. They hold each other and he feels her shaking a little which is good. He can’t be the only one falling apart here.

She put herself back together so well, she looks fearless. That was always her way, he supposes. He steps back eventually, tries to take her in. She is breathless and smiling, brittle but warm. 

“Come inside, Charlotte,” he says, careful not to say Dominique. Her name catches at the back of his throat. Charlotte. All that time, this was who she was, underneath. 

Julien leads her to the kitchen, the room that has changed the least. He wants to see her against an old backdrop, fit together the woman he remembers and the woman that’s here now. She’s smiling as she steps into the house even though he thinks there is remembered sorrow in her eyes too. It’s a relief to see it, to know that Charlotte holds the same people in her memory as he does. The ones without fake names to hide behind, whose identities got obscured anyway by the letter J stamped across their papers: André Duguay, Jacob Duguay, Auguste Levade. 

“I’ll make coffee and there’s bread if you’re hungry,” he tells her, giving her an encouraging smile. She’s here, they’ve already kissed once but he still needs time to get used to the idea of her as she is now. It was always his father’s solution: eat. 

There are tears in her eyes, sprung from nowhere, when she turns to him, “Is there jam?” 

He nods, yes, there’s jam. The war’s over Charlotte, he thinks. Even with rationing, this isn’t Paris, we can make our own jam if we need it. It’s funny that she’s stood in front of him, looking him straight in the eye, but he’s just not used to speaking aloud to her anymore. 

“Help yourself,” he says instead, pulling bits and pieces off the shelf to put in front of her. Small offerings. 

She sits herself at the table and he sits opposite her. 

“You’ve come a long way?” He asks, not knowing where to start amidst all the things he doesn’t know about her. She smiles widely at him, understanding.

“From Scotland, originally,” she tells him. 

“Scottish?” He confirms to himself more than to her.

“Don’t be mistaking me for English now,” she teases him. 

“I wouldn’t dare,” he assures her. 

“Good,” she says, in English, a rich cadence colouring the word, the same as when she said her name. 

“You’re fixing up the house?” She asks, her turn for a question.

“It was time.” 

“I didn’t know if you would be here at all. I couldn’t find out what had happened to you,” the anguish in her voice touches him deeply. He hadn’t thought there was anyone left to feel that way about him. 

“I just came back, quietly, after the war. We’re all very good at pretending not much went on here, before.” 

“Will I be remembered?” She asks. 

“Most likely,” he tells her, “You were never very good at going unnoticed.” 

“Well I’m glad no one asked you for an evaluation of my skills as an agent,” but she’s laughing a little. Her teasing is tentative, they're both so wary of each other still. 

“You’re too glamorous for a town like this and that was before you were foreign and blonde.” 

“I looked for you in town first,” she admits. 

“Well, then my reputation as my father’s son is secure,” Julien says. He doesn’t mean anything by it, but she goes quiet anyway, reaches her hand up to his cheek, acknowledging their mutual loss. 

“Charlotte,” he phrases it like a question.

“Yes?”

“I’m happy you came back,” he turns his face in to kiss her palm. 

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

He takes her hand from his cheek and stands, gently tugging at her to stand to, moving them away from the table. He puts his arms around her. Perhaps his father was right, the food has done him good, just a little bread and jam to ground him, to make it feel real. She’s here, they ate together, Julien and Charlotte and the mutual friends that lurk in their memories. 

“Come upstairs with me,” he says, asking again.

“Alright,” she agrees, smiling again, that wide, emphatic-lipstick smile. She looks impossibly happy to be here. 

It’s Charlotte who leads the way - to the room she used as Dominique. 

The sun is setting and it frames her face perfectly as she turns to him, “Kiss me,” she tells him. 

“You’re beautiful,” he says, because he can say these things now. She came back.

She comes into his arms, full of that wild grace that seems all the more remarkable now. How had he thought she wasn’t real? There isn’t anyone more real to him. She’s pale and a little angular as she steps out of her clothes in front of him. She stops in just her chemise to undress him as he stands helplessly before her. He lets his knuckles drift over the silk shift while her long fingers undo the buttons of his shirt, they tremble slightly, and there’s a moment where he remembers her bent over a railway track fiddling with the wires for the explosive. Those same fingers. He lifts her chin gently with one hand and kisses her carefully, impulsively seeking to reassure her that her bravery won’t go to waste now. She pushes his shirt off his shoulders and draws him into her, deepening his kiss. Pressed against her, just the thin sheen of silk between them, he can feel the tight tips of her nipples, and he can trace the curve of her waist. He dips his head to kiss into the arc of her neck. 

She reaches for his belt and when his trousers drop he pulls at her chemise, drawing it up over her head, discarding it as he moves her towards the bed. She goes first, pulling him down over her. It’s the same need as when Dominique first kissed him, distracted and angry as he was, that need pulled him along, swallowing him down, away from everything else. The way he wants her, Charlotte, is the same, except more so. Always with Dominique, he would have known he wasn’t getting everything, that she was a facade of another woman. Charlotte is everything, she’s Dominique and everything hidden behind Dominique.

“Why did you come back?” He asks her between kisses, his hands running up and down her sides, seeking purchase.

“To find you,” she says, breathless as she widens her legs to him, pulling him closer towards her. He’s hard as he rubs himself against her, trying to hold himself back as much as possible. He doesn’t know anything about Scottish women and what they expect from their lovers. 

“There’s condoms in my bag,” she says urgently, almost whispering. He pulls himself up a little, he knows he’s smiling strangely at her, intrigued at how she’s answering his question about her expectations even without him voicing it. He leaves her on the bed to go retrieve her travel case. He finds the British made latex rubbers in a small side pocket and he takes one out, opening it as he goes. 

“Let me,” she says, sitting up on the bed. He goes to her, on his knees between her legs, and she reaches for him. Her fingers are careful and so artlessly teasing as she rolls the condom onto him. 

“Okay?” She asks. He can only nod, kiss her, lower her down slowly, his hands in that thick blonde hair, as soft as he’d remembered, or imagined, he’s not sure which. 

He says her name as he enters her, repeats it as he eases himself all the way inside, “Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte.” 

Her nose crinkles even as her mouth opens in a little gust of sensation, “It sounds funny in a french accent, I’d forgotten that,” she tells him. 

“Sorry,” he says, as he withdraws a little, still holding himself as carefully as possible. 

“Don’t be sorry,” she manages to get out as she arches up, her body chasing after him, “I like it.” 

He slides back into her as he drags his palm down from her neck to her hip, feeling the energy surge through her as she responds to his rhythm inside of her. He kisses her, kisses her neck, her collarbone, her shoulder, her breasts. Her hands hold him to her, tangling in his hair. He loves how she reaches for him, draws him closer, he loves being a part of her. He puts one hand between her legs, slides his fingers over her, slipping down to where they’re joined. She smiles up at him, eyes holding his. 

“I wanted to find you,” she repeats. 

“You did,” he says, “you found me. I was hoping you would.” 

She comes around him before he lets himself come inside her. She’s perfect as she shudders out her orgasm and he crawls up into her arms when it’s over, happy to stay wrapped up in her. 

There’s one more thing to ask but he knows it’s not fair to ask it now. It’s too soon and too loaded. He tightens his arm around her waist instead, kisses at the skin closest to him, at the bottom of her neck. She answers him anyway, because she’s always been more certain than him in this, forthright about what needed to be done.

“I’m here to stay.”

That’s good, he thinks, that’s good, because the alternative would not have made any sense. This is what he has waited for. The future skitters out before him: the lines marking boundaries in big houses, the new roof for this place, drying out the basement. Suddenly it doesn’t matter if he does any of them or not. He gathers up his love from between the cracks of his old life, lets it seep back into him, steady and ready to soar. He smiles into Charlotte's skin, feeling the goosebumps that follow the path of his lips. Her hands are in his hair again, anchoring him to her. He finds there’s no overestimating the sensation of having something to live for. She’s here to stay. Even if she wasn’t so certain, it would be something to fight for. Something to build towards; something to last.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from a song quoted in the novel by Sebastien Faulks:  
>  _“One day the young men came back from the war, the corn was high and our sweethearts were waiting…”_  
>  Charlotte Gray, p317/Birdsong, p11
> 
> Oodles of thanks to my beta!


End file.
